Professors David Sinclair, Brian Kennedy want us to live longer, healthier

Geneticists and anti-ageing researchers believe we are on the brink of a breakthrough that will greatly expand human longevity.
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Helen Hawkes

In laboratories around the world researchers are working feverishly on something that used to be considered a crank idea: delaying death or, at the least, the onset of chronic diseases that cause suffering and the shrinkage of our health span.

Professor Brian Kennedy, director of the Centre for Healthy Ageing at the National University of Singapore, believes a drug that extends healthy life by at least a decade is only 10 to 15 years away.

Among the most promising discoveries, he says, is something called the mTOR pathway and sirtuins – proteins in the body that regulate functions such as DNA repair, genome stability, inflammatory response and cell cycle. These youth superstars first gained attention when they were found to be responsible for some of the longevity-promoting effects of kilojoule restriction.

Australian expat and geneticist Professor David Sinclair, founding director of the Paul F. Glenn Centre for the Biology of Ageing at Harvard, believes a longevity pill is even closer. It was Sinclair who first showed that resveratrol, an antioxidant found in red wine, could activate Sirtuin 1 and have an effect on ageing, something that led GlaxoSmithKline to buy his Sirtris Pharmaceuticals in 2008 for a whopping $US720 million.

A breakthrough is close, he says. "We have more than 100 PhDs working on [life-extension drugs] commercially across dozens of companies, and expect to have the first products to market within three to four years. Within five to 10 years there will be multiple medicines available to mitigate ageing."

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Kennedy believes the international collective of researchers are "looking at different lamp posts on the same street". Ultimately, the pathway to delaying or even stopping ageing may not be one discovery but a series of findings.

"The good news is that, over the last five years, we have gone from having no biomolecular markers of ageing to having a lot of them," says Kennedy. "We've also identified lots of genetic mutations that extend lifespan. The challenge is that we don't know why. We need to have a better understanding of the basic mechanisms that are causing ageing and how they are linked to potential drugs' activity."

On the market

One pill that is perhaps close to extending lifespan, in that it is already on the market, is the diabetes drug metformin. Already prescribed off-label to treat obesity, polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, it excited anti-ageing enthusiasts when researchers found those who take metformin tend to have fewer heart attacks, get cancer less frequently and, in at least some studies, were less likely to suffer from dementia.

Australian expat and geneticist Professor David Sinclair believes a longevity pill is close at hand.
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Ned David and Nobel laureate James Watson, co-founders of biotech firm Unity Biotechnology, are reported to take metformin off-label for anti-ageing.

But what of the rest of us? A five-year, $US70 million ($A90 million) study of 3000 men and women between the ages of 65 and 79, dubbed Targeting Ageing with Metformin, may supply the answer.

The company claims to have demonstrated in animal models that selectively eliminating senescent cells reverses or prevents a wide range of diseases, including osteoarthritis, atherosclerosis, eye diseases and kidney diseases. "Imagine a future in which it doesn't hurt to grow old," its website trumpets.

Ageing is not classified as a disease so high-tech supplements are the only option right now.
Peter Braig

Google is committed to its own anti-ageing company, Calico, which launched in 2013 with $US1.5 billion. It is studying naked mole rats, which live for about 30 years.

Up and downside

Perhaps more promising than naked rats is a drug called rapamycin, which is under the microscope at ResTORbio, a biopharmaceutical company based in Boston. This Federal Drug Administration-approved compound appears to suppress some cancers and affect cognitive decline; on the downside, it suppresses immune function.

If you're asking what you can do, right now, to join the scientific elite in the quest for a longer, healthier life, good luck getting a longevity prescription. Ageing is not yet classified as a disease. But you can dip your toe in the waters of, dare we say it, eternal life, with some high-tech supplements.

The pay-off for research companies that develop a drug that extends health and lifespan is significant, with the market worth an estimated $26 billion a year.
Phil Carrick

Those promising sirtuins appear to be activated by another biological substance called NAD+, which keeps our body's DNA repair mechanism working smoothly but which also decreases with age.

As part of a UNSW team, Sinclair worked on making an NAD+ precursor, called NMN, into a drug, and human trials began last year at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital. Sinclair himself is reported to take 500 milligrams of NMN daily but says the manufacturing is complicated and expensive, and it costs him $US1000 a month.

Nevertheless, several supplements that claim to increase NAD+ are on the market, including NMN capsules and powder from RevGenetics. One unavailable in Australia is Basis, an anti-ageing supplement designed by a company backed by several Nobel Prize winners.

Nourishment while fasting

Another anti-ageing option is something long considered one of the most effective ways to improve health and lifespan (or just make it feel longer) – fasting.

L-Nutra's Fast Mimicking Diets, available only in the US, were invented at the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California. The promise: to nourish the body while keeping it in a fasting mode, positively affecting levels of glucose, cholesterol, blood pressure and other key health factors.

For the research companies that successfully develop a drug that extends both health and lifespan, the pay-off is significant: $26 billion a year is the estimated market for an effective drug.

Yet, besides profit, says Kennedy, such a development would have enormous economic benefits in that it would reduce health costs and increase productivity.

"Treating disease after people are sick is not really working," he says. "It is regenerative medicine that will maximise health span."

Sinclair has already stated that the first person to live to 150 has already been born. "I don't think we're going to be immortal," he says, "but there's no law of biology that says we can't live for 200 years."